


apotheosis

by lupinely



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, leia reflects immediately after the events of tlj
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 19:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13219416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: Always the leader, never the hero. Always the survivor. Never the one who at last gets to set aside the fight.Leia Organa will hold the line until the very end.





	apotheosis

**Author's Note:**

> we love & miss you, carrie.

 

 

 

When Luke first wanted to start his own Jedi school, a little temple, he asked Leia to go with him.

“To learn?” she asked, puzzled. They had talked about this a few times, and she had studied a little with Luke before but not much. In some ways she was scared of the power they both had and what it might mean, what it might say about her, about her brother whom she had come to adore with fierce protectiveness. It was a link to Vader that felt somehow surer than the fact of their lineage, a connection that transcended that of merely blood, which Leia could dismiss because of the love of her true parents, Bail and Breha. But the Force was irrefutable; undismissable. It could not be denied.

Luke stared at her, equally baffled. “To teach."

She was honored by his offer, and of the depths of his love and respect for her to which it spoke. But teaching the ways of the Force, of the Jedi, was even more frightening to her than learning them. “I’m no Jedi,” she told him gently.

And he had smiled. “Neither am I. Not really.”

But it was the ‘not really’ where the distinction between them lay, and Luke could not see that, could not understand what Leia meant when she tried to explain. Not yet. At the time, she had not fully understood it herself.

They were twenty-six then, still young, younger than Leia can imagine being now. Ben had been two years old. They had not known yet that he was Force sensitive. But Leia had suspected it; Han feared it. Maybe Luke had known and said nothing, known and wanted Leia to help him with the school for that reason, because he had been afraid of doing it alone.

But that was the way it was: all of them had to follow their own responsibilities alone. Leia was busy restoring the Galactic Senate, running peace-establishing missions across the galaxy, cleaning up the remains of the Empire’s twenty year reign. Luke was searching for Jedi history, lore, any guidance that he could find. He had his eyes turned on the past, as he always had: the furthermost horizon. Leia looked towards the future because she had to. Perhaps because she was afraid of looking back. Yet if that were true, it could be said of Luke as well: for certainly he was afraid of looking ahead, now that what he knew needed to be done was finished.

What next? The future of the galaxy was before them, indeterminate, unshaped. They would be the ones to shape it. The immensity of that responsibility had not fully struck either of them yet.

 

 

Leia was the first: the pillar of strength to which the others had all been drawn. At sixteen years old she had entered the Galactic Senate, and at nineteen she had watched it crumble as absolutely as Alderaan had been obliterated, and nearly as violently. Already she was a leader in the rebellion. Luke was just a farm boy, Han just a smuggler. In Luke’s case that had been by design, for his own protection. Obi-Wan Kenobi had made the choice to protect Luke, hide him absolutely, and entrusted Leia to Bail. Despite her love for her parents, Leia could never help the bitterness she felt when she looked at Luke in the first few weeks after learning that they were siblings, that their lives had both been dictated by the choices of the dying Jedi Order in its final death throes. All hope had been placed in Luke and squirreled away with him. Yet that meant the hope that Leia brought she had fought for in its entirety, every small piece of it. All of it was due to her, because of who she was at her core, not because of who she had been born to be.

Later Leia would realize that was true of Luke, too. Obi-Wan’s mistakes, or choices perhaps, were not Luke’s fault, nor his decision. And in the end the decisions Luke made on the second Death Star had been in complete defiance of the entire legacy of the Jedi Order, though Luke had not known that, did not see it. But Leia, who had studied history—real history, as preserved by her true father—knew the failings of the Order and the history of the Republic better than Luke did, who had grown up isolated on Tatooine. She knew that the Jedi had helped create Vader. She knew that Vader's legacy was not one of the Sith, but of the Jedi, halfway turned.

The last of the old Jedi, Luke was in his own way—and that was good, for the Jedi had failed. And he was the first of the new, which too was good, because Leia trusted him completely, trusted him in ways that frightened her with their absoluteness. If anyone could rewrite the Jedi Order, root out its wrongs, it was Luke Skywalker. Leia trusted him. She believed.

And Leia is also the last: the last of the Rebellion, and the first of the Resistance. That mantle is heavy in its own way, as burdensome a weight as Luke’s own legacy, but she understands her place in the myth better. She knows her duty: she always has.

To be the last one standing is a story of determination more than anything else. And Leia Organa is nothing if she is not, down to her very bones, determined. Resolute.

Stalwart. A fortress of steel. Of these things glory is not born. She knows that too. She always has.

Leia Organa will hold the line until the very end.

 

 

Leaving the Rebellion is something that Leia truly never even thought about. This was eventually what came between her and Han and ended their tumultuous on-off relationship of fifteen years, though not their friendship. “You should settle down,” Han used to say to her, not condescendingly but with real fervor, born of care; “you deserve it, Leia. You deserve to live in the peace that you helped create. Aren’t you tired?” Yet settling down never appealed to her. What was the point? Their son was a teenager and already studying with Luke; the peace of the galaxy, though achieved, was fragile and transient, and Leia feared greatly for its longevity, though she never discussed these fears with anyone else. She was good at reading the signs. Bail had told her what it was like during the Clone Wars and even the years before those wars—how fragile peace was, a thin veneer of civility gilding a galaxy that was rotting from the inside out. Another war had been won now, the war against the Empire. But not, Leia thought, the war against that rottenness, against the cloaked and hidden evil that still hid somewhere in the heart of the galaxy, elusive, patient, smiling. A truth still yet to be known. A fight still yet to be fought—not with blasters or lightsabers, but in the hearts and minds of every person in the galaxy, though they suspected this battle not.

But Leia did. And could put no voice to it. And so her work is never done, because her work is the preparation of the galaxy for this fight, keeping vigilant, hearts open but guarded. No one else can do that job but her. Not as well, at least. And that isn’t vanity; it is surety, determination. Han suspected this, though not consciously, which is why he feared for her. He wanted her to get out of the Senate while she could before everything broke bad once more, because things always did. Han knew that better than anyone. To everything a season: and the seasons of the galaxy were shorter yet longer than one might ever expect.

What rose before would rise again. Age-old battles would repeat, countless times over. At least until the heart of the galaxy were discovered fully, and known, and preserved. That elusive beating heart that Leia can sense but not understand. Is it the Force? she wonders. But she thinks rather that the Force is simply a manifestation of this feeling that she has, one of the ways that the galaxy tries to maintain itself and protect its heart. The Force, she thinks—and Luke sometimes agrees with her, sometimes does not—is the galaxy expressing itself, the galaxy fumbling towards consciousness, accountability.

Something like that, anyway, she said to Luke once.

He stared at her, but did not laugh. He looked thoughtful and sad and a little afraid. He was nearing forty, now; they both were. She still had not come to join him at his school. I think, he said, his gaze faraway, lightyears away; I think....

But what he thought, he never said. Not to her. Not yet.

  

 

Once someone has shown you who they are and what they believe, do not convince yourself that you somehow know the truth of them better than they do.

That was a mistake Leia made once, despite lessons learned over and over again. It was what fundamentally came between her and Luke, if anything ever really did. She would never have given Vader his second chance, the outstretched hand that Luke held out to him. She still could not believe that Vader had taken it. Not really. Had he deserved that chance, deserved the redemption that Luke offered? Alderaan, obliterated; a galaxy held in terror for two full decades. No, Leia thinks, Vader had not deserved it. Her father had not deserved it. But the redemption had been for Luke’s sake more than anyone else’s, and that redemption Luke did deserve. If only for the strength of his conviction, of his belief; of his bottomless and utterly unconditional love.

Only Luke could have done something like that: save Vader. And even he only once. Everyone must make their own choices.

Leia tried to explain this to Rey after the Resistance left Crait, after they both felt Luke pass from this life into whatever might be beyond it. Rey was sad and deeply troubled, for she is young and still has yet to learn this lesson that Leia knows by heart, that even she had ignored once when Luke first told her what had happened to her son.

Rey has the reaction that Leia expected. “But Ben,” she says, then stops and looks angry with herself. “Kylo,” she corrects; “he’s your son.” She looks at Leia, searching her, desperate to understand.

“Yes,” Leia says, “and Vader was my father. What of it?”

Rey pauses. “Luke saved Vader.”

“He did,” Leia says. She is only partly agreeing, but the galaxy only knows the story of the Skywalker family, and not its truth. Not the way she and Luke both know it. “But I would not have. Do you see?”

Rey thinks again for a long time. “Because of Alderaan,” she says at last.

“For many reasons,” Leia says, “that being one of them.” For my parents, she thinks, but does not say it. Even that is only a part of the truth. “Because he did not deserve it, in the end, and I did not need it. But Luke did. Do you understand?”

It is clear that Rey does not, but she accepts Leia’s words with humble grace. She will learn, Leia thinks; she will have to, now. In the same way that Leia, nineteen years old, had once had to learn hard lessons of her own when she gave Tarkin the name of Dantooine rather than Yavin 4 and so watched her home planet, her heart-place, brought to dust while her father stood behind her and said nothing at all.

Ben had made his choice, half a dozen times over; the same way Leia had always made hers. Resolutely, without backing down. At first Han had blamed her, then Luke, then finally himself. For Leia’s part, she thinks there is more than enough blame to go around. She had given Luke all the books she had on the rise and fall of the Jedi Order when he first founded his little school, including the ones that Bail himself had written in secret. She had hoped they would help him avoid the same mistakes, and maybe he had.

But she had chosen not to go with him, in the end. Hadn’t she?

 

 

Obi-Wan never visited her the way he did Luke sometimes. Until one day he did.

Leia was meditating, a practice she picked up from Luke. Around her the varied objects of her small quarters hung suspended in the air, slowly revolving around her as she sat cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed.

A feeling of powerful silence. Then: “Your power has grown.”

She opened her eyes; did not let the objects fall, but lowered them slowly, deliberately. She recognized the voice instantly though she had heard it only once, the voice of this man whom she never actually met, whom she watched die. You haven’t seen anything yet, she thought. “No thanks to you,” she said, and smiled at Obi-Wan Kenobi: white-bearded, hooded, cloaked, shimmering with an inner light in the middle of her small quarters.

“Undoubtedly,” he said gravely, still watching her.

They sat in silence for a while, looking at each other. Leia realized suddenly and forcefully that she wished Obi-Wan were not here, that he had continued to avoid her even through all the long years of his return to the Force, as he always had done before. “Why are you here?” she asked, blunt as ever.

Obi-Wan thought about it; this was something he always had done, she realized, though his thinking had perhaps done him less good in the end than he hoped. But she could relate to that, at least. That feeling of unavoidable powerlessness. “Perhaps to apologize,” he said. “Though truthfully I am not entirely sure. I did not choose to appear here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Leia looked at him. “You should know that all is forgiven by now,” she said at last, though in some ways not all of it could ever be forgiven. “I named my son after you, after all.”

It was a joke, and hardly a funny one. Ben had burned Luke’s school to the ground just two years prior. Leia was now fifty years old.

“You did, in a way,” Obi-Wan agreed. He looked at her, almost smiling. “Why?”

Leia considered. “You know,” she said; “even now, I truly have no idea.”

Obi-Wan laughed.

 

 

When Luke first told her what Ben had done—though she already knew part of it, had felt his grief and Ben’s from lightyears away even as it happened—she had wanted to be angry with him. Furious. But how could she be? Hadn’t Luke tried to do what she had always said the Jedi Council should have done: end a great evil before it could come to its full power? They should have killed Vader when they had the chance, she had said to Luke once, impassioned with anger and grief on the anniversary of Alderaan’s destruction, and he had borne her anger silently, without judgment. They should have seen his fall coming.

In the end, what Luke had chosen with Ben was in direct defiance of the cold dead teachings of the Jedi Order: choosing attachment over non-emotion, over an inflated false sense of justice. Mercy, but not quite. He would have tried to help Ben, had Ben not immediately run: and that was the difference between his choice and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s made five decades earlier. Luke, unlike the Jedi Order, did not hide from his problems or bury them under layers of esoteric dogma and indecision. Given the chance, he would have made it right.

But sometimes the chance is not given to you. And that is a truth that must be borne, must be lived with, even when everything else fades in the background; fades to dust.

Amilyn used to say that there are leaders and there are heroes, and they are rarely the same. But even Amilyn had gotten to go out as a hero in the end. Han, Amilyn, Luke, dozens of others. Leia is the last one left.

My turn, Leia thinks, watching Crait shrink in the distance behind them as the last remnants of the Resistance escape to hyperspace; when will it be my turn?

Always the leader, never the hero. Always the survivor. Never the one who at last gets to set aside the fight.

Hold the line, she tells herself. Just keep holding the line.

She always does.

 

 

She comes across Poe, Finn, Rey, and Rose in one of the smaller compartments on the Falcon as they traverse hyperspace. When Leia seems them together—they do not see her yet—she remembers similar moments from her own past long ago. Hugging Luke tight after rescuing him from Bespin, Lando standing worried at her side with Chewbacca. The quiet moment that she, Han, and Luke had shared on Tatooine a few months later, after Han’s rescue: standing there in silence during the roaring of a sandstorm, all looking at each other through the haze, determined, united, joined by their grief and their love and their trust in each other. Those sorts of moments were the ones that always stuck with her the most powerfully. The moments between the battles, the glory. The gentle moments of pain and hurt, and solace too.

This is one of the first such moments that Poe, Finn, Rey, and Rose will share together, but not the last, Leia thinks. Her heart aches and delights for them, for the challenges they will face together in the years to come, the triumphs they will have, for there will be triumphs, yet griefs and failures, too. She watches them in the familiar crew quarters of the Millennium Falcon, holding back a smile. This is what Poe has needed, she thinks: the steadiness that a trusted group of companions provides. And Finn, too, will flourish with the support of his friends, as will Rose Tico, and Rey needs this reminder of normalcy, of this simple quiet love as she struggles with new powers too great for her to begin yet to understand. Leia remembers that feeling well. She only got to where she is now because of the people she had at her side. That has always been the truth, despite her fierce independence, her ability to go it alone when necessity required it—as it often did.

The last of the Rebellion, Leia thinks, and smiles. The truth of war is that it does not end once the battles have been won or lost; the rebuilding afterwards is where the true responsibility lies. For decades now she has wondered whether she did it right. For a while, watching the rise of the First Order, she had thought that she failed, that all her work was being undone as she watched, that her legacy would be one of half-successes and failures.

But now, looking at these four standing on the starship that harbors the last members of the Resistance, Leia thinks that maybe she did better than she ever could have imagined. And she is not done fighting yet.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
